The high point of vocations to the Roman Catholic priesthood in the UK was in the late 1950s, and seminary photographs from the period show ranks of young men in clerical garb ready to serve in parishes created to accommodate a still-growing Church.

In recent decades, by contrast, the shortage of priests and decline of congregations have meant consolidating parishes and decommissioning seminaries. It was not altogether a surprise, therefore, when in April the Scottish Catholic Bishops announced that the last domestic seminary, Scotus College in Glasgow, would close this summer and that henceforth candidates for the priesthood would be sent to Rome for their training.

Thoughts of this were in the minds of those gathered earlier this month to celebrate the acquisition of Scalan, (from the Gaelic for a turf-roofed shelter), a building that formed part of the first significant Scottish seminary. It stands in the Braes of Glenlivet, in Cairngorm whisky country, a simple 18th-century stone building long referred to as “the hidden college”.

The Scalan association exists to preserve the fabric and the memory of this important piece of Scottish Catholic history, but it is interesting to place it within a larger period that runs from the 15th century to the present day and which provides an unexpected context for the closure of Scotus.

Two stories intertwine: first, that of the ancient Scottish universities before the Reformation; and second that of the creation of the Catholic seminary system following it. Scots seeking higher education first studied at Oxford, Cambridge or Paris; but with the creation of St Andrews in 1413, of Glasgow in 1451 and of King’s College Aberdeen in 1495, they had their own universities and, as elsewhere, an important function of these was to provide priests.

With the Reformation, however, and the formal abolition of the Catholic faith by the Scottish Parliament in 1560, the remaining Catholics looked again to the Continent. Old connections were strengthened, and existing Scottish residences were incorporated in a series of new foundations. Between 1600 and 1627, Scots Colleges were established in Rome and in Paris, at Douai in Flanders and at Valladolid in Spain.

Not everyone who studied at these entered or even was intended for the priesthood; but other events, also triggered by the Reformation, led to the Scots colleges becoming primarily places for priestly formation. After its initial shock at the religious revolutions of the 16th century the Catholic Church gathered itself for an effort at counter-reformation. A crucial aspect of this was the Council of Trent that began in 1545 and was only finally concluded in 1563. Among the enduring products of this tremendous effort to define, regularise and promote aspects of Catholic faith and practice came the Cathechism, the Tridentine Rite of Mass, and Liturgical Missal.

From it also came the idea of creating schools for the training of priests who would serve as diocesan clergy. Thus was born the idea of the Catholic ecclesiastical seminary.

In Rome, Paris, Douai and Valladolid, meanwhile, Scots students were meeting those of English and other “national” colleges and generally attending lectures at the surrounding universities. The result was a new kind of formation for priesthood: on the one hand continuous with the old idea of a university education but with the added structure of a seminary training.

The Scots colleges sent back priests to serve in the Highlands and Lowlands, but initially, with persecution and penalties, the period for which a priest might serve before being discovered and prosecuted or expelled was relatively limited.

By stages, however, confidence grew, and in 1694 Pope Innocent XII initiated a new phase of missionary activity by appointing Thomas Nicholson as the first “Vicar Apostolic” for Scotland, a provisional post intended to lead in due course to the creation of one or more bishops.

Nicholson was an Aberdeen graduate who converted to Catholicism and then studied at Douai and taught in Padua. Once back in Scotland, in 1704 he ordained the first priest there since the reformation, and in 1714 created a small seminary on an island in Loch Morar in the Western Highlands.

This would only last a year. Students of the Scots Colleges were committed supporters of the Stuart cause, and with the collapse of the Jacobite rising of 1715 there was a new round of Catholic suppression.

What had begun was continued next at the secret seminary opened in the Braes of Scalan the following year. The second Jacobite rebellion of 1745 led to further arrests and exiles, and this first turf-roofed house was destroyed. Rebuilt, it continued for 50 years before staff and students transferred to properties granted them by Catholic gentry: first at Aquhorties, then in the grander setting of the house and estate of Blairs near Aberdeen. Opened in 1829, this continued to train priests for more than 150 years until its own closure in 1986.

By that point the decline in vocations was well established, leading first to the amalgamation of seminaries, then to their closure, bringing us now to the ending of seminary training in Scotland almost 300 years after Nicholson established it on Loch Morar.

This might all sound like a history of loss; but the longer history of Scottish Catholicism shows many phases of expansion and contraction, of advance and setback. More importantly, however, the decision henceforth to send candidates to Scots College Rome represents a restoration of a tradition older than that of the domestic seminaries, and it takes students back to the heart of Western Christianity, and to an environment in which they have access, as did their predecessors, to universities dating from medieval and counter-reformation times.

With candidates now tending to be older, and many already graduates, this change promises to provide coming priests with direct experience of Rome at a stage when they can better appreciate it, and with that also experience of the universal character of the Church as they mix with students from every continent, hopefully countering any tendency to the parochialism and tribalism that sometimes blighted the modern Scottish Catholic Church.

Professor John Haldane is Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, University of St Andrews

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